Event... Pentecost Sunday Sermon... Acts 2: 1-21

Acts 2:1-21 New Revised Standard Version (NRSV)

The Coming of the Holy Spirit

2 When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2 And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

5 Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7 Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8 And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9 Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11 Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” 12 All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” 13 But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

Peter Addresses the Crowd

14 But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. 15 Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. 16 No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

17 ‘In the last days it will be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,
    and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
    and your old men shall dream dreams.
18 Even upon my slaves, both men and women,
    in those days I will pour out my Spirit;
        and they shall prophesy.
19 And I will show portents in the heaven above
    and signs on the earth below,
        blood, and fire, and smoky mist.
20 The sun shall be turned to darkness
    and the moon to blood,
        before the coming of the Lord’s great and glorious day.
21 Then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’

Good morning!

I have made an interesting discovery the last couple of weeks:  In almost ten years of intermittent preaching – more, if you count youth worship services in my distant past – I have never, ever preached on the Holy Spirit. 

Why not?  Why is this topic so hard?  I’ve preached on things that should be harder – grief and loss, sin; death, even – but never the Holy Spirit.  Yet the promise of the Holy Spirit’s presence and activity in our lives is one of the chief promises given by Jesus Christ.  So why do we sometimes shy away from talking about it? 

One author I read this week suggested that the old term of “Holy Ghost” may have been more appropriate – as is our trepidation that this specter who haunts us may pop out at unexpected times to disturb and frighten.  

Another wrote that the images of wind and fire can lead us to consider the Holy Spirit a destructive force – one best quietly tiptoed past as we pray not to be noticed.  

One thing is certain – Pentecost, and the advent of the Holy Spirit, particularly as it is described in Acts Chapter 2, is a radical, relentless, unfolding event.  The Spirit is unpredictable, goes against cultural and social power structures, and the event of Pentecost is still is unfinished today.  Through the Spirit, God promises to radically change us from who we are to who God created us to be.  The Holy Spirit promises to radically shake us, overturn us, haunt us – and save us. 

Grace and peace to you from God our Creator and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ – Amen

There are individuals and denominations that love talking about the Spirit, I admit.  They willingly call themselves “Spirit-filled,” and talk about people like me “quenching the spirit” in hushed and scandalized tones.  But one of the reasons I think I personally have shied away from preaching on the idea of asking for more of the Holy Spirit to come into our lives and into our church is that I think there are so many wrong ideas out there about what the Spirit does.  There are people of faith who truly believe that if you are living in line with the Holy Spirit that you will have success, popularity, a big house, a nice car, a great spouse and healthy children. So if that is true, what if we pray for the Holy Spirit to enter our lives and then something unexpected happens?  We lose our job?  Or are diagnosed with an illness?  Or our child gets sick or hurt?  Did God renege?  Were our prayers not good enough? 

There is much Biblical evidence that God loves to give their children good gifts – just think about all the lovely oxygen that God has freely filled this room with!  But those gifts are given to everyone – and if we start thinking that our material possessions or our health are evidence of whether the Holy Spirit is present in our lives or not, we are eventually in a lot of trouble. 

But we know this, right?  I would be pretty shocked to find that what we call “prosperity theology” had ever been preached from this pulpit. 

Maybe we are more afraid that if we earnestly and sincerely pray for the Holy Spirit to fully enter into us that it actually will. 

We know that that doesn’t look like sports cars and swimming pools – what does God actually promise will happen to us if the Spirit enters our lives? 

I think the answers to that question are all over the Scripture – but in some ways they are encapsulated right here in Acts.  Through the Spirit, God promises us radical change from who we are to who God created us to be.  Through the Spirit, God promises us radical change from who we are to who God created us to be. 

I read a book this week called “Rich in Love.”  It is by a woman named Irene Garcia.  She and her husband Diego have fostered 35 kids and adopted 16 of them.  They are now in their late fifties and there are currently eleven children and teens living in their home.  I have three children, and some people would consider that a big family – I cannot even begin to imagine the love, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and self-control required to live with eleven! 

One could argue that Irene and Diego are definitely living out who God created them to be.  They have answered the call to care for orphans, and done so radically. 

But they did not start their married life with the patience, kindness, self-control and other “fruits of the spirit” necessary for this work.  In fact, Irene writes in her book, they started out very, very messy.  They got pregnant at fifteen and were married because of this at sixteen.  As young married people, Diego drank and became physically abusive – when he was sober Irene retaliated with abusive words calculated to hurt and crush. 

She writes “the darker the darkness, the greater the miracle of change,” and that God is the real hero of their story.  She writes that their story was messy, and the children they adopt are a broken mess that they trust God to resurrect out of the horrors in which they began to grow up.  God has radically changed Irene and Diego Garcia into who God created them to be, and God is using them to radically change young people into who they were created to be as well.  This is the promise of the Holy Spirit. 

But God does not only promise radical change in us through the Holy Spirit, but God also promises radical change in the world.  

In Acts Chapter 2, Luke tells us, through the prophet Joel, that when God’s Spirit is poured out, Children, elderly, and slaves – both male and female – will prophesy.  This isn’t Nostradamus-style fortune telling or predicting the future.  In Biblical terms, to prophesy means to tell God’s truth. 

So – who is going to be the mouthpiece of God in this time of the Spirit?  Priests and pastors?  Rulers?  Wealthy people of power and status? 

Well, no.   Children, elderly, and slaves, both male and – lowest of the low – female. 

The implication then and now is that if we want to hear the voice of God, and the truth that God is giving to the world, that these are the groups we will need to listen to. 

Does the world we live in value these people?  Or will actively listening and accepting God’s truth from a high school student or a nursing home resident require radical changes in who we are as a culture?

And what groups of people are the modern social status equivalent of what female slaves were that day in Jerusalem?  The very bottom – not even considered a human but a usable commodity – or a used-up one that needed to be discarded…  The poor?  The homeless? The uneducated? The immigrant?  The prisoner?  Who is it in each of our lives that we look at and think, consciously or unconsciously, that that person cannot possibly be able to tell us any meaningful truth?   What about the person on the other side of a political or ethical issue?  The co-worker or family member toward whom we hold a grudge?  What if those are the very people that God wants us to rethink, to value, to listen to?

I don’t know if I want to actively pray for that kind of radical change. 

And I think – I think that God knows that.   God know that you and I can’t make these kinds of changes in ourselves, by ourselves, even if we wanted to – so what does God say next through the prophet Joel? 

In the “last days” – which is an inadequate translation for the Greek “eschaton,” since we tend to think of it as literally days when the time of humanity post-Christ could be tens of thousands of years – God promises to provide wonders and signs – specifically blood and fire and smoke. 

Do these terrifying signs match our experience of the eschaton?  Well, maybe sometimes – wars and disasters, both natural and human.  But do they match what we know of a loving God whose very NEXT words are that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved?”

What if these signs and wonders are not scary, but sacraments.  The very things that God uses week after week to change us from who we are into who God created us to be.  What if the smoke is to remind us of prayers that rise like incense – our sacrament of confession that creates a radical willingness to be transformed.  What if the fire is to remind us of baptism – in word and water and, in Jesus’ words, in the Holy Spirit and fire… a radical change of love and inclusion into God’s family.  And what if – what if – the blood is not ours but His – the blood of Jesus Christ shed for you for the radical forgiveness of sins, changing us from within as we bring the presence of Christ into our bodies week after week. 

God doesn’t leave the radical change through the Holy Spirit up to us and our prayers.  The good news is that this is God’s work in us.  All who call on the name of the Lord will be saved.  And we all cry out to God, don’t we? 

Maybe we already know what will happen when the Holy Spirit enters into our hearts and minds and lives.  We know what that gap is between who we are right now and who God created us to be.  Maybe it is an old resentment that we are holding that requires radical forgiveness.  Maybe there is a radical change to our values system that God wants to make in us that will require us to see whole groups of people differently – and as a result, see ourselves differently, too.   Maybe we know that we are too insulated, too comfortable, and God wants to shake us, make a radical change in our love for others that will result in risk and discomfort. 

It’s not easy.  We respond to God’s saving love for us by being willing to undergo radical changes that can be difficult and painful—turning us into people of radical forgiveness, radical love, and sometimes radical action from that love – and we literally ask for our old selves to die in these radical changes. 

But the good news is that through that death we have radical life.  Wild, unpredictable, tongues of flame, raging wind, resurrection from the grave life.  When the Holy Spirit changes us from who we are to who we were created to be, we participate in the ongoing Pentecost event that overturns the world and brings all people into the saving love of Jesus Christ.  It’s not history.  It’s not controlled or encapsulated.  It is real and happening and ours.  Happy Pentecost.